How to Fix Critical WooCommerce SEO Issues

Note: This post is written by Brandon Graves, a WordPress expert and digital marketing strategist. He specializes in html to WordPress conversion, E-commerce Plugin development, etc.

Frequent online shopping is an integral part of the life of millions of tech-savvy people around the world. So, all small and large scale ecommerce websites vie with each other for the first search ranking of their products on Google (and to a much lesser extent on other search engines). As a result, ecommerce SEO is a lot more competitive and its methods are different from that of general websites.

When you operate a full-fledged online shop with WooCommerce, critical WooCommerce SEO issues come across your way several times. If your store is poorly optimized, you not only lose good ranking on different search engines, but also face huge deficits in business opportunities and revenues created every day.

Are you troubled with WooCommerce SEO issues? Looking for effective and sustainable solutions? If yes, then here are a few tips:

1. Using manufacturer’s product description

You have to complete many tasks and take care of a number of administrative issues to run and manage a WooCommerce website. Due to the busy schedule and work pressure, 95% of all online merchants use the product description provided by the manufacturers.

Always keep in mind that the product descriptions you get from manufacturers will cause content duplication issues if they are already used by the owners of other ecommerce websites. Google hates duplicate content and punishes such websites severely sooner or later.

Solution:

Write authentic and informative product descriptions yourself. If you don’t have enough time to perform that work, hire expert content creators. Unique product descriptions add more value to your website and encourage shoppers to buy from your site.

2. Your ecommerce site is slow

Loading time matters a lot when it comes to shopping online. Shoppers love fast ecommerce websites so that they can easily find products in less time. Slow-loading websites make them unhappy. So, they will hit the back button on those websites and search for alternatives. The ranking of your website, reputation, revenues – everything will be affected negatively if this is a case with you.

Solution:

Take all possible steps to make your website load faster. Google will prefer your website or its pages while displaying results to visitors if they load faster.

3. Your website is not responsive

Responsive websites have become mandatory for all modern sites due to the rapidly growing number of mobile internet users. If your website is not responsive to different mobile devices, Google will avoid it while displaying results to visitors or punish it with a low ranking on its SERPs. If your site’s ranking plummets in Google search results, the volume of ecommerce business you generate will start to decline rapidly.

Solution:

Make your website responsive at all costs.

If you have sufficient budget, manpower, and resources, you can create a separate mobile version of your site. If not, you can ask the web developer to convert your existing site into a responsive website. You can also use WordPress plugins to take your website to the mobile platform with less expenses. Responsive websites rank well in Google search results and fetch more business opportunities.

4. Failing to deal with content duplication issue

(This is in addition to point #1. In this section we’re talking about content duplication across products on your shop that are similar with minor variations like color, size etc.)

The entire ecommerce business depends on the supply of customer-centric, meaningful and unique content. A killer content can help websites or its pages to float prominently on the world-wide web with the targeted keywords and grab the attention of millions of shoppers on the web. The demand for quality content is always higher than the actual supply. So, acute shortage of quality content encourages entrepreneurs to use low-quality content for ecommerce website optimization.

Google doesn’t tolerate such unlawful practice aimed at getting an unfair advantage in search engine results. Websites loaded with duplicate content are frequently targeted by Google to help genuine entrepreneurs get the right compensation in the ecommerce business for their hard work.

Solution:

Don’t use poor quality content for website optimization. Create SEO optimized content and avoid unnecessary keyword stuffing as far as possible. Proofread the written content at least 2 times before using it. Make sure that your content is totally unique and help visitors find information easily.

5. Non-optimized images

Images are widely used on ecommerce websites to help shoppers understand the content easily and take decisions quicker. SEO professionals make a big mistake here. They extract images from the image search results and upload it on their website without optimizing it.

Using too many unoptimized images on your ecommerce website puts more pressure on the site’s server and makes it slow. Once your website becomes sluggish, your web-based business will start to deplete little by little.

Solution:

Don’t steal images from other websites. Just click images yourself, use the appropriate image framework and trim their sizes if possible. Add ALT attributes to the image content. It helps search engines to understand the images easily. Well-optimized images give a great boost to your SEO efforts and prevent undue pressure on the site’s server.

6. Neglecting onsite SEO

After tasting success, most entrepreneurs assume that they have established their brand in the market and they can generate more business opportunities simply by adding more product pages to their ecommerce sites.

Always keep in mind that shoppers will not land on your ecommerce site just because you have added attractive product pages. Lack of onsite SEO affects your site’s ranking and performance negatively.

7. Not prioritizing SMO

Social media optimization is necessary for boosting your site’s ranking in Google SERPs. Many shop owners just forget social (lack of time, resources etc). A WooCommerce store with a strong presence on leading social media websites can perform well on different search engines than a store with no social media presence.

Solution:

Prioritize SMO at all costs. Share your site’s content on your social media pages and encourage your fans/followers to do the same. Always keep in mind, more social sharing and linking of your posts = improved ranking on Google and more social leads.